Bovie Movie

In the same year that a hit cable television series, The Sopranos, successfully mined the same premise, this comedy about a mobster seeking advice from a psychiatrist was a box office winner for director Harold Ramis. Billy Crystal stars as Dr. Ben Sobel, a New York shrink who’s becoming a little bored with his upscale but neurotic clientele. Into Sobel’s practice comes a guy with legitimate problems, Mafia kingpin Paul Viti (Robert DeNiro), a godfather who is being reduced to tears and panic attacks by stress and his guilt over his beloved father’s assassination. Intimidated but also fascinated by Viti, Dr. Sobel becomes frustrated when his mob boss patient becomes a full-time occupation, as Viti summons the psychiatrist for his professional help at all hours and in all places, even including the doctor’s Florida wedding to TV reporter Laura MacNamara (Lisa Kudrow). In the meantime, a power struggle is brewing with Viti’s long-time rival Primo Sidone (Chazz Palminteri), but Viti begins employing the feel-good self-help jargon and techniques he’s learned from Dr. Sobel to keep his enemy off balance. Just as the therapist and his powerful patient are making breakthroughs, the FBI attempts to persuade Sobel that Viti is going to have him murdered, leading to a nearly lethal misunderstanding.

Feeling that they are doing God’s will, two Catholic men from Boston set out to kill everyone in this Reservoir Dogs-style vigilante thriller. Brothers Conner and Murphy MacManus (Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus) take to performing their divine duty against the Russian mob. They massacre a bunch of unsuspecting Mafioso in a scene of absurd violence, then they let more blood in a mass killing of porn-shop customers. Instead of getting thrown in jail, they are dubbed “saints” by the Boston Herald, and they are praised by brilliant, tortured, and gay FBI agent Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe).

Having created an empire on girly shows and skin flicks, Jim Mitchell and Artie Mitchell achieved mainstream success with Behind the Green Door (1972), one of only a handful of hardcore porn movies to do so. Brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen star in the film about the life and troubled times of porn’s dynamic duo. Opening with the 1991 fratricidal murder of Artie (Sheen) at the hands of Jim (Estevez, who also directs), the film flashes back to their father lecturing them on the importance of family. In 1967, while studying film at San Francisco State, Jim’s professor (Peter Bogdanovich) upbraids him for including numerous leering shots of half-naked women in his student works. Soon Jim along with his brother, fresh out of the Army, starts a smut studio in an old warehouse. Their business takes off, and in no time they are being harassed by the police for obscenity. Along the way, the two hire former Ivory Snow model Marilyn Chambers, get married, and snort half of the cocaine in Bolivia. After the fleeting success of Green Door, their lives spiral into a drug-addled hell. Jim eventually bottoms out, but Artie, wracked by a profound inferiority complex, slides into cocaine dementia and begins to threaten Jim’s family. Things eventually boil over, culminating in that bloody night in 1991. This film was screened at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival.